Posts tagged Davidwest at FanHouse

One of the best things about last season was the fact that so many teams were good that you didn't expect. The bad thing was that they all played in small markets, and therefore were only on national television for about a second and a half before returning you to your regularly scheduled Lakers versus Mavericks game. Well, apparently the NBA is going to go ahead and try something different after last year's disastrous Greg Oden vs. Kevin Durant Christmas Day matchup. That game lost its luster of course due to Oden's injury and that the fact that the Sonics were worse than watching your alcoholic uncle fall off the wagon and face first into the spiked eggnog for the third year running. That left us with quite the bad taste in our mouths, but this year, we get a unique treat.

New Orleans.com has gotten a copy of the Hornets's 2008 schedule and is reporting that the Hornets will face off against the Orlando Magic next year on Christmas Day. The game is expected to be held the night of Christmas Day and most likely on TNT. I would expect the usual Lakers ratings blowout in the early game, and possibly another crack at Oden vs. Durant in the afternoon. But the nightcap, hoo boy.

And then there were four. In the latest of our continuing series, we look at the Western Conference Finals, Game 1 tonight between the Spurs and Lakers. Be sure to stop by later for our LiveBlog of Game 1.

1. Seventeen Thousandth Verse, Same As The First: Yes, a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale world. Lakers versus Spurs! Who would have thunk it? Okay, that was my last complaint for this series, I swear. In all honesty, this is a pretty fantastic matchup between the two best teams in the league right now. The familiarity between the two will make for advanced strategy that will make pundits like myself polish their monacles in greedy expectation. Will the Spurs stay with the single man defense against Kobe Bryant, using Bruce Bowen like they have in years past, or has age made that too much of a mismatch, forcing the Spurs into man-help? Will the Lakers bring the curl around double team on Tim Duncan or bring Vlad Radmonovic off of Manu Ginobili? Will the Spurs be able to adjust to Pau Gasol? Will the Lakers be able to adjust to Gasol getting his milkshake drank by Tim Duncan? Questions abound! Who needs different teams?

The Rotation is a weekly study on the NBA by one of our All-Star voices. In rotation this week is Brett Edwards.

The playoff series between the Hornets and the Spurs has been consistently one-sided so far -- the home side. The local team has won each of the six games by at least 11 points, the first time such a statistical anomaly has occurred in NBA history. I think that's likely to change tonight though, because for all of the Hornets talent, the Spurs' collective experience is likely to be the deciding factor.

It's been argued that experience is overrated in the NBA playoffs, and Chris Paul was used as the poster boy and case study to prove the argument to be true. But playing well individually and winning home games is one thing.

The Hornets have really been the better team this entire series. They've largely stuck to what has worked for them all season, while the Spurs have had to make some substantial adjustments from game to game. But now the Hornets will have to prove they can evolve: For an upstart team to eliminate a team with a ring in a Game 7 -- even in your own building -- is something else entirely.

Game Seven. No way out except onward. The defending champs responded at home and sent a message about their physical approach. Now the Hornets are at home, hoping to knock off the Spurs and keep them from their "one for the thumb." In an expanded edition of our playoff game previews, here are seven things to keep an eye on in tonight's Spurs-Hornets Game 7.





1. Let's Get The Ugliness Out Of The Way: David West will play. So will Robert Horry. And it'll probably be fine and nothing else will happen. But the tension will be there. And don't be completely shocked if there's another incident of "good playoff basketball" somewhere that ends up with West clutching his back again. These things "just happen." Meanwhile, Horry will be booed like he probably never has been before. Suns fans didn't get another shot at him that season and are notoriously civil. I would not expect the same treatment from the New Orleans folks. There's going to be a lot of physical play and don't be surprised if we see more technical fouls as both teams are really getting to dislike one another.

2. Duncan Versus West: Mano A Mano: The Spurs are 1-1 in putting Tim Duncan on David West one on one. Duncan was able to shut down the All-Star before the "good hard playoff basketball" by using his size and length in conjunction with a cohesive Spurs effort that jacked up the spacing for the Hornets on the offensive end. Conversely, in Game 5, with a healthy David West and the confidence of homecourt, West was nearly unstoppable. If he gets separation from Duncan and freezes him with the drive fake, he can get his jumper going, and that's when he gets scary. Conversely, Tyson Chandler has the job of guarding Duncan on the defensive end, but West has held his own. You never know which Tim Duncan is going to show up anymore. The bamboozled veteran that seems to slow and too clumsy to ever get anything going, or the best power forward in the history of the game. The Spurs can win without Duncan going off, and they can lose with Duncan scoring 30+, but both scenarios are very difficult to achieve.

After 28 straight days of NBA postseason action, with series schedules oddly staggered for maximum television exposure, the playoffs are taking a day off on Saturday. Now, your first inclination might be to ask, Why today? Why take a day off when the Spurs and Hornets played Game 6 on Thursday yet won't play Game 7 until the following Monday?

Well, the answer is simple. The NBA is taking a breather to let its sister league, the WNBA, take center stage on the day of its season tip-off.

Which is a decision that is identical to the play of Hornets hustle player Ryan Bowen: noble but flawed.

Last week when there was a large amount of hub-hub about Utah Jazz fans being classless, I understood why a lot of people were upset. The guy holding up one eye? Yeah, that guy is pretty clearly a waste of human space. And if the fans were actually chanting "Cancer" at Derek Fisher? Well, then, they've won "Classless Fans of the Year 2008", hands down. But for rooting against a guy who left their team to go to a rival, when there's not a lot of information (nor should there be) about which hospital his daughter spends more time in, Los Angeles or New York? I'm not a fan of it, but fans are going to boo just about anything. And the LA Times' one-sided over-dramatization of it was a little much.

But if we're going to talk about "Classless Fans of the Year 2008", we have a late contender! Last night, after Robert Horry's "completely clean, incidental, and admirably 'playoff-level'" whack to the injured back of David West, which sent the New Orleans star to the locker room and may affect his appearance in Game 7, a funny little sound started to come from the arena. Slowly it grew louder and louder.

"Horry! Horry! Horry!"

That's right. After a player delivered a forearm that knocked an opponent out of the game with what was obviously a pretty painful back injury, the San Antonio fans decided to chant Cheap Shot Bob's name.

Now that's class.

But then, maybe we should chant his name! I'll tell you why after the jump.

For the second straight playoff season, Robert Horry finds himself in the middle of a "dirty/not dirty" play controversy. After setting a back pick for David West that knocked the Hornets' star from the game, everyone is going to the video of last year's hit on Steve Nash and saying something to the effect of, "look, he did it again!" First the clip of the play on West (at the 1:29 mark), then the discussion.

I'm the last person in the world that you would expect to come to the defense of the Spurs' edition of Robert Horry, but I'm going to do exactly that -- at least a little bit.

Sitting there trying to reflect on what the possible loss of David West would mean to the Hornets ("devastating" and "series-ending" come to mind at first), I couldn't help but think of what Robert Horry did to Steve Nash last year. That's because Mark Jackson, Mike Breen and Jeff Van Gundy kept mentioning it. And with good reason -- West was hobbling to the locker room because Horry stuck him in the back with a pick under the post.

It probably was not illegal. And it probably does not deserve a flagrant foul. But it certainly was not what a "winner" would do, as Jackson (who seems less and less concerned with sounding intelligent now that his coaching gig has vanished into thin air) kept proclaiming.

What I want to know is, are all of Big Shot Bob's ridiculously, um, big shots from years past clouding our judgment about the way he's been utilized over the past few years? He's accruing a foul every 3.4 minutes this year, and maybe that's just a direct representation of Greg Popovich's Hack-A-____ strategy thus far. But if it is, doesn't that kind of indicate even further that Horry is his quiet enforcer on the floor?

I don't want to call Horry a dirty player, because he has given the NBA some ridiculously memorable shots over the years (his role in Hitch notwithstanding). However, the quietly discomforting abuse of personal foul rules that the Spurs are using this year has already been discussed publicly by the commissioner.

In another of our continuing series, five things to keep an eye out for tonight in the Hornets-Spurs Western Conference Semifinals Game 6 this evening.

1. Backs To The Wall: Well, here we are, San Antonio. The Spurs are not very used to having their backs against the wall, they usually are the ones doing the shoving. But tonight at home will either be the last stand of one of the most quietly dominant dynasties in NBA history or the night where the old gunslingers draw the line in the sand. With a raucous (and possibly, maybe sell-out) crowd behind them, the odds are in the favor of the boys in black and silver. However, against a Hornets team that's going to be feeling the momentum and smelling blood, they can't let up. They need to make some of the same adjustments they made in Games 3 and 4, and some new ones to prevent the Game 5 massacre. Like, oh, I don't know, keeping David West from single handedly annihilating you.

2. Feet On The Floor, Head In The Clouds: The health of Tyson Chandler and David West will be of great concern tomorrow night. Chandler's foot was so bad that afterwards he said he probably wouldn't walk on it that night but said he would be "fine." He then reiterated that sentiment on his blog, which was quite lengthy for a guy that just played a bunch of minutes in a playoff game against Tim Duncan, I might add. Meanwhile West was in obvious physical pain and still managed to destroy the Spurs in what can only be described as a symphony of catastrophic moves that had to make Spurs fans wonder if he was Satan himself. Still, injuries are injuries and teams that are beat up usually don't do so well on the road. We'll see if the devil gets paid his due tonight or if Manu Ginobili and Bruce Bowen can fire up the fiddle again.

Every now and again there are some stupendous, silly, stupid, or downright outlandish individual lines from around the L. Doing Lines lets you know which one tops the list.

Just when people started to wonder if their run was over, the Hornets stomped all over the Spurs to the tune of 101-79 on Tuesday night. Chris Paul (22 points, 14 assists) was his usually stellar self, but David West was simply awesome, scoring 38 (16-25 FG) with 14 boards, five blocks, five assists and a pair of steals.

West is often overshadowed by CP3's almost-nightly brilliance, but the Hornets wouldn't be where they are -- one win away from the franchise's first conference finals appearance -- without their other All-Star.

Also Receiving Votes:
Antonio McDyess' sdouble-double (17 points, 11 boards) may not look all that spectacular on paper, but when you consider the work he did down the stretch coming down with seemingly every loose ball in a close game, it's not hard to see why Rip Hamilton (31 points, 16-16 FT) called him the MVP of the game. Making it all the more impressive was the fact that McDyess played the game with a heavy heart, learning just hours before tip-off that his grandmother, who helped raise him, passed away Tuesday afternoon.

Dwight Howard: Rebounds are about effort, and effort never slumps, which is why Howard finished Tuesday's game with 17 boards. That said, his shot abandoned him in the most crucial game of the year: he shot just 6-15 from the free-throw line. Howard now has all summer to think about how he missed nine freebies in an elimination game which the Magic lost by five.

Tim Duncan: Sure, he was held to just 10 points, but 23 rebounds? That's just silly.